Today’s post in the Migration and Deployment series went live today via Harold Wong. “When Windows Azure first released, it was only available as a Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering. The benefit of PaaS is that you (an organization, company, etc.) don’t have to worry about maintaining the server hardware or Operating System on which your application runs. The service automatically handles that for you and it provides a level of fault tolerance / redundancy. The challenge for the IT Pro when Azure first released is that it seemed to take the IT Pro out of the picture and left everything in the hands of the Developer (from setup to management to deployment). I myself know a few developers that took advantage of Azure to get things done quicker without having to deal with the politics and such when working with an IT department that has processes that need to be followed (for a very good reason). This worked great at the beginning, but then eventually, the environment was too difficult for the Developer to manage and then they had to enlist the help of the IT Department (IT Pros to the rescue) to take over the care and maintenance of the Azure PaaS environment. Read more at Harold’s blog here: